Where All The Lost Spooks Go
by gottalovett
Summary: A two part post 5.5 Au that looks at the place where the lost spooks go. Part 1 follows Ruth. Part 2 follows another two members of the Grid from later on in the show. I never thought I'd fic for Spooks again but I found myself enjoying writing this wip. I still love Ruth.
1. By Plane or by Sea

Her skin tingled. The coat sat all wrong; baggy and too long in the arms, tight at the hips. The ash black matched Ruth's mood and the persistent London weather. (An obvious metaphor for the day of parting if ever there was one). A fresh and sharp scent stuck in her throat and for a moment Ruth gagged.

* * *

"Sweet tea. That's what you need."

Even as he said it, he was already opening cupboard doors, fingering their insides with long fingers (She has memorised the way he moves. Committed his mannerisms to memory. In a new kitchen and with a new name, will she replicate the scene; fingers splaying, eyes soft? Will she dispense of irritations with a well chosen aphorism, wear out the carpet with her pacing? With the passing of time and in love with a ghost, will she morph into him?)

She smiled at him and he smiled at her but even then they didn't dare speak. He swirled the sugar in the mug with _such_ precision and she was transfixed as the granules made sticky patterns against the teaspoon before sinking and dissolving as though they had never been.

* * *

She thinks that she won't see anything beyond salty tears but the bobbing of the uncertain junk tips her close to an edge. Reflections in the water or in slate clouds- either way she cannot look away.

Steel. Cold. Ice. Slipping. Chips of blue. Blonde shards. And she had never, not once, said sorry. And yet... yet... she had been there. In Ruth's house. Switching coats.

Was that a kind of apology?

* * *

They almost bumped noses in the hotel and both of them, both of them had wanted to close the gap and press their mouth and their body (No- but that was another age and she will never wear that hippie shirt again).

* * *

She can't stop replaying, like her mind is some kind of broken record, the way she swallowed her fear and put both hands on his cold cheeks and pressed her lips to his just to make him stop talking because it is better to leave it as something wonderful, something unreal and fantasy tinged and _unsaid_, rather than dropping words by The Thames for strangers to pick up and to examine.

And because it has been unsaid, because the thing that they have grown is glorious and sacred in its great silence, she unclasps the necklace, pauses as it sits in her hand.

Each stone feels like a facet, a part of her. Ruth. Ruthie.

She counts to ten, holds her breath and figuratively lets the water close over her head and rebirth her essence.

The necklace trails through her fingers and plops down, down, down...

* * *

Zaf sat beside her, drained by the cement harshness of the quay, waiting with her till the end, with newfound respect etched in the lines of his face. (Or had it always been there, and she had never spared a glance or a thought for the Techie who had dared to take Danny's place?)

"I'll keep smiling, Ruth," he said so soft she had to lean in and dip her head to his shoulder. "Every time I see a pretty girl, it will be for you."

She tilted her head and her chin hit the edge of his coat. There was a quiet fierceness in his expression, and a cold conviction. (Had he taken lessons from Ros?).

"I mean it, Ruth. All of those pretty girls will be a shadow against the flame."

"I... you don't have to..."

She trailed off. Something inside Zaf had snapped. It wasn't meant to go this way, his taut muscles whispered to the dawn sky. _She_ wasn't meant to leave. _I believed... we all believed... Ruth, you were a bloody heart, a gaping wound, and you reminded us how to feel._

* * *

The necklace crests a wave and vanishes.

Ruth remembers spinning a garnet ring as Harry made her lips curve and bread rolls dance.

And she remembers eating at a restaurant, painfully awkward, because it was them and it was so hard to swallow, manage a knife and fork and articulate. (Articulate what? Had she ever known?)

* * *

She knew the others worried that Adam's expression remained one note. She never did.

At night she'd twist a silk scarf between thumb and forefinger. Fiona had gifted it to her one birthday. She'd hold the thin strip and remember the way Fiona always smiled over Adam's shoulder.

Even now, a smile over Adam's shoulder, until he turned around and she was gone.

* * *

A man drops a rope ladder from the side of the large ship. The junk has pulled up alongside it in a cough of petrol.

"Come on, Ruth."

She gapes. This thing is to get her to Greece? She knows she was public service and could expect nothing but cut backs but arriving on a Grecian shore in this ship? She'd sink before her feet touched the shore, and no, despite what Jo and Zaf thought, she was no miracle worker. She couldn't walk on water.

The man notices her hesitation and extends his hand.

"There's been a change of plan."

Panic sets in. Is this some elaborate ploy of Mace's? Is she headed to jail after all- or back to being a pawn in someone else's game? (When has she ever known the layout of the chess board? Should she have tried harder to find a strategy or did that make her too much like _them_?)

* * *

"Ruth," Harry said, hands fidgeting on the desk. "I-"

"I know," she whispered, but this time she didn't have tears on her cheeks. They'd dried up after Danny and a bomb and countless, countless nights-

She slipped her hand across the desk till they sat over his, smiled in reassurance. "I'll talk to Adam."

"Sylvia Plath said her best piece was Ariel," she whispers, teetering on the edge of the junk.

The man laughs.

"I always liked Lady Lazarus."

Her shoulders sag in relief and she steadies herself against the rope ladder.

* * *

"There's two passports here, Ruth," Adam said, voice clipped and smooth and _precise_. "Use one to get out of here... your real one and then the second one will be your new identity in Greece."

She flipped the second one open. Jane. She didn't want to be a Jane.

Adam smiled painfully.

"Jo has been re-reading the classics and thought the name would be ironic with a thin slice of optimism."

Ruth was leaving gothic storms and old heritage buildings and the love of her employer behind. Could she find a Mr Rochester in Greece? But then, Jo was still young and naive and fresh. How long would it take for that lustre to fade?

"Tell her thanks."

"No need. The entire team is working together on this one."

"Adam," she whispered, "I was so angry at first that you weren't Tom-"

"Hush," he said, stepping forward and folding her in his arms. "It's different now."

"Keep him strong and safe for me," she said, and he didn't need a name to know who she meant. "And Adam..."

"Yes?" he said, eyes dancing, yet still hurting. "Look after yourself. Please. For Wes at least."

The shutters came down.

"You know I will, Ruth."

Was it Fiona reflected in the glass of the window and in the hall mirror as he turned away?

* * *

She steadies herself against the rope ladder and then climbs on to the larger boat. The man catches her wrists and helps her on to the deck.

"We're cruising down The Thames," the man says conversationally. "Then we'll drop you for Heathrow. I have your ticket," he says as she leans against him in surprise. He waves it in her face. She takes it and slits it open. It is addressed to her in Adam's writing. She glances at the name.

Jane Briar.

_Hi, I'm Jane. Jane Briar_. The syllables make her mouth form alien shapes. (What will it take to unmake and remake a person?)

* * *

They sat together in the restaurant and somehow Ruth still couldn't find the right words (they had buried themselves deep within the soul and she was afraid to claw them out).

"New York or Paris?"

"New York."

What a joke. New York was never her kind of city.

"Where's your sense of romance?"

"Where's your sense of Atlanticism?"

A quick and pert put down. Easily said, impossible to reclaim.'

* * *

The man (he said with a straight face that his name was Bob Ewing and he liked hopping out of multiple showers) got off the boat on an embankment just out of Central London. Another man sat in a cab reading a newspaper, parked front on to the small beach inlet.

"How's your love? Does she still insist that she eats men like air?" 'Bob' says through the taxi's unfurled window.

"Yes," the man in the taxi replies, flinging the paper into the back seat. "She dyed her hair red this week."

They climb into the Taxi.

The drive through London's congested traffic is largely silent. Ruth is glad. She is relieved to finally have time to sit and to think. (She will have the rest of her life to sit and think).

"Will you miss it?" the taxi driver asks as they pull into Heathrow.

She contorts her face into a smile and pushes days of automatic code breaking and file sorting and 'born spook' out of her mind.

"No."

* * *

She was stuck in a room with the mad woman trying to lie her way out. The irony. Her. Ruth. She doesn't like to lie (and in this job!)

She said her name is Angela and she was angry. Very angry. But to construct a fantasy around Princess Diana, to construct a tissue thin web around your dead partner? The only way to combat that kind of madness, was to fight back with your own.

Peter. Blackpool. It had happened but the pattern had been laid out wrong for Angela.

Ruth remembered that blossom of first love along the pebbly shore, falling against a pylon with Peter, laughing. And he was her half brother and forbidden. (This said a lot about her- that she always chose forbidden loves).

* * *

'Bob' comes with her into the airport and makes sure she gets her ticket exchanged. He passes her a bag.

"There's a bathroom. Change your clothes and leave the bag in the cubicle second from the right."

In a daze, she does as she is told. As she pulls the plain working dress on, and sheds Ros' jacket and her own skirt and top, she wonders if someone (Adam?) will reclaim her things. A tear slides down one cheek. She sees Harry holding the skirt to his face and burying his silent grief in what remains. But no, she is wallowing, for Harry would never lose composure like that. Would he?

When she comes out, 'Bob' walks her to the terminal. She looks at the flight name. LFT3450 to Los Angelos.

"What happened to Greece and someplace sunny?" she murmurs.

"We don't want anyone following you," 'Bob' says. He waits in companionable silence with her until she is able to board. He watches her, eyes hooded, as she steps closer to the plane and she has a moment of panic, the last sliver of her old life left behind as she walks through to the tarmac. With a shake of her head, she tells herself to dispose of 'Bob,' a man she never knew, and at last she is on the plane, her handbag stowed beneath her feet. (They had let her keep that at least).

As the plane takes off, she tries to ignore the pressure building in her ears and in her heart. At least she has a seat to herself. Small graces.

As the plane skims through white clouds, Ruth sees them all, just for a moment-

Tom imploding. Zoe drowned and born again with Will. Danny sacrificing himself for Fiona because Zoe was gone where he could never follow. Fiona killed, Colin killed, Sam vanished. And what would the others be doing now? She imagined Ros as ice cold as ever and Harry swirling a glass of liquor, convincing himself to go around to Ruth's house- no, her old house- to look after the cats. She saw Zaf and Jo meeting after work, speaking in hushed voices. There would be tears. There will be no tears on Malcolm's face. He too, understands the tears shed on the inside. For Colin swinging in the woods.

There is a lump in her own throat.

Are Zoe and Will happy? Tom and Christine?

Is it possible to go on intact?

She gets up to go to the toilet. She will touch up her face, force a smile, stare at her reflection in the plane wall and convince herself that she is fine. _She is fine_.

She is halfway to the back of the plane when the hand touches her shoulder. She forces herself to remain steady at the heavy pressure on her shoulder blade as a name unfurls like a banner or a declaration or an accusation.

"Ruth."


	2. Oh Captain, I Will Follow

She turns around to stare into the face of the man who still somehow, despite everything, has a face as open and honest as a summer sky. Her breath catches with emotion.

"I thought... we all thought-"

A smile skims across his lips. The stoic expression that made him such a good spy (easily convincing, easily dependable, yet a person erased into shadow) reaching the steady blue eyes.

"It's good to see you again, Ruth."

He extends a hand and like one in a dream, she eases into his smooth hand shake. Her lips form words (So many words to choose from. Thoughts crash like the waves that rose to swallow him and batter him against some other sandy shore). And then someone touches her shoulder.

"Excuse me. I need the toilet."

She swings around, lips still parted, and stares at the idiot who has interrupted- well, interrupted what exactly?

"Excuse me," the man repeats, irritation lacing his clipped Cambridge accent. "I. Need. To. Get. Past."

Tom puts an arm about Ruth's shoulders.

"Sorry," he says lightly (as though he had never left. As though he had never stopped knowing how to diffuse bombs.) "Just two friends who haven't seen each other in awhile."

And then he is steering Ruth to the other side of the plane.

* * *

"I'm giving you a second chance, Evershed," he said on a bench by The Thames.

She wrapped her fluffy white coat about her protectively as he gave nothing away.

"I could take you to the cleaners."

"Please Tom. I love my job. I love working here. Don't tell Harry."

Powerful blue eyes weighed her up (just as they did terrorists and mad men and other liars). They had searched her soul and been the first to know the truth.

He nodded. Just once. The slate grey sky reflected his mood. It didn't matter.

* * *

Tom stops at his own seat.

"This is me."

So many questions threaten to tumble out and to choke her. Why are you here? Where's Christine? Are you happy? Is this planned or an unlikely happy accident?

She asks nothing. Just nods as Tom summons the air hostess.

"I'd like to move seats. Next to this lovely lady," he says, indicating Ruth. "We're old work colleagues." He smiles in his steadily British, good natured way. "We'd like to catch up."

The hostess raises an eyebrow but nods under Tom's piercing gaze.

"Follow me, Sir," she says after glancing at Ruth's ticket.

Tom squeezes into the seat beside Ruth and dismisses the air hostess with a perfunctory hand wave.

"Thanks. That's all."

Quick to assess. Quick to dismiss. Quick and effective judgement. The first and the best born spook.

_On the head of the King, let all the sorrows lie._

* * *

"Breathe, Ruth, breathe," she told herself over and over. Her eyes ached from looking at everyone in fluoro orange uniforms and her head ached from numb fright. She tried not to think about her cat, alone, as a sticky end claimed him and London both.

What was her purpose? What should she do? (No. What could she do without a thing to analyse?)

She tried to ignore Tom's clenched jaw as he weighed up her current state, noted the sharp scissors in the wall. Even in her own fear, she spotted Tom's nervous tic beneath the steel-hard control. How long till his own ticking bomb blew?

And Harry? Harry wouldn't listen.

Tom cleared his throat, bringing her back to reality.

"When the lights come back on, you'll be the most important person in this room."

_Pull through for me_, is what Tom meant, _don't lose it for me. You and me, Ruth. Both made of sterner stuff. If not both born to lead, both born to this profession_.

* * *

Her hand reaches out to touch his shoulder, shies away again, as if afraid the man before her is a ghost, as insubstantial and as wish-coated as memories and old, reoccurring dreams.

"We...I've missed you so much."

Her voice cracks.

Tom still doesn't really smile (but then he never had back then either).

"Me too, Ruth. It's good to see you."

"What happened?" she manages. "Where did you go? Christine?"

She trails off as she looks into those blue, blue eyes. The dreadful emptiness that had claimed them under ocean waves so long ago was gone.

"Christine and I laid low for a time. Then we moved to LA and started our own private business."

"In banking?" she asks with a slight laugh. She couldn't imagine it.

"Christine wouldn't hear of it. Private contract work. Finding people who don't want to be found. Recovering stolen goods. Off shore analysis for spy networks. That kind of thing."

Ruth tries to stop her lips from quirking.

"Successful?"

"Moderately," Tom says without batting an eyelid. "Offices in LA, New York, Barbados, The Cayman Islands, and even a shabby back office in London."

Ruth swallows. That's why he and her are here after all.

"Was it...?" she closes her eyes for a moment and wills away tears.

"Not Harry," Tom finishes her sentence for her. "Adam. He always was a forward thinking man. A worthy replacement."

Ruth nods. She won't tell Tom about Fiona and the silk scarf and the feelings Adam locked away, and then played out in a dangerous cocktail of casual sex and self pity. Something is crushing her chest right where her heart sits. A Harry shaped mark imprinted on her soul.

* * *

"Harry, I'm worried about Tom," she said by The Thames.

"So am I," he admitted, hands almost sitting over hers on The Embankment railing.

"What do we do?" she asked, gazing resolutely at the back of Westminster.

"Do? Do? It's the job, Ruth. He has to sort it out for himself."

She swallowed back a reply. _He's a human being, Harry, and one of us and loyal. Doesn't that count for something? Doesn't that mean we should try? _

"Stand by me on this one," Harry said.

She threw bitter words away, buried them deep down, and nodded. What did she know about it? She was no Section Head.

* * *

"So we go to LA and then?" she asks. "Will you let the team know?"

"No messages. You know that Ruth. Right now, Adam's organising your funeral."

Cold. Brutal. But Tom, as always, knew the right things to say to his team. Dependable, steady, perennially calm Tom. She would listen and follow wherever he piped, he, so secure in plodding forward.

And yet? She can't help but close her eyes again at his words. She sees them all- around the freshly dug grave- few people in attendance. (She, more than any of them, had always been the sum of her job) And Harry?

Harry laying flowers on an empty grave, on their metaphorical black pit of an ending.

* * *

Zoe and Danny stood shoulder to shoulder by the shore. They told Ruth about it afterwards. The way there had been no words, little thought even, as the choppers circled and two speed boats crested the salty waves.

Ruth hadn't moved from the cottage. Over and over, Harry fell before her eyes as Tom's rifle bullet tore through the flesh, Ruth's hands in her mouth. In any other circumstance it would have been Tom to pick the Team up and put them back together. Not this time. Danny steered Ruth to the ambulance crew and a shock blanket as they bundled Harry into another vehicle bound for hospital.

"It will be all right," he whispered, though his own eyes were dark with shock and hurt.

Her world had shattered. How could anything ever be all right again?

That night, Danny took Ruth to his apartment with Zoe. They drank wine out of tea cups. Danny told Ruth about the odd stick symbol message that Tom had left on the sand as his parting shot.

"I used to love drawing pictures in wet sand," Zoe said dreamily. "Back then it was all a game."

Ruth thought about her own childhood, about her and Peter tripping as they raced each other into the waves, splashing and calling across distances.

She wondered if all three of them stood on the beach- her, Danny and Zoe- would they see the ghosts of their pasts lining the horizon? Would all three see Tom as a smiling ghost on cloud edges?

* * *

She doesn't speak again; not when they disembark from the plane. Not when she shows her new passport and gives her name as Jane Briar. _Jane Briar. _She doesn't speak when Tom leads her out of the airport and into a waiting taxi. Still she doesn't speak, even when the female driver looks in the mirror and Ruth sees a wisp of platinum blonde hair and piercing, cool eyes.

_So_, Ruth thinks numbly. _Enter Christine_.

* * *

"Tom, is she right for you?" Ruth asked one day, the two of them staying back late on The Grid; Ruth because she didn't like to face the yawning loneliness of her small house, Tom for his own inscrutable reasons.

"Ruth?" he said without looking up from a file.

"You know who I mean."

She couldn't help but sound accusing. A CIA operative and a glamorous beaurocratic stereotype. It felt like betrayal.

"I don't speak about my personal life."

"But I'm asking," she pushed.

He pushed the file away and frowned.

"I'm tired. Goodnight Ruth."

She held back tears as he exited the pods. She thought back to times sitting next to each other on London benches. Had she imagined his look, that suggestion of something more?

What did it matter now?

* * *

"Ruth. Long time no see," Christine drawls as she zips through crowded lanes.

"Yes."

"You're very quiet. Though I remember thinking that it wouldn't take much to rub the shine off your 'fresh start' attitude."

"Christine," Tom says. It is a warning.

"Sorry," she murmurs. "The whole thing was terrible. What they did to Tom and I." Silence hangs like a curtain.

_What you and your people did to Tom and I_, Ruth hears in the warm taxi air. She tries not to think about Harry banging against the desk, some hidden beast unleashed, because Tom Quinn had been brought down by the CIA, no, worse yet, by love for a woman.

"It's terrible what happened to you. Tom told me about it. The sacrifice you made. You are an exceptional woman, Ruth Evershed."

"I never felt exceptional. I don't feel exceptional now."

"You can't beat yourself up forever," Tom says, twisting around to frown at her from his position in the front passenger seat. "At some point you have to turn your back on the service. Forget about them like they'll forget about you. Bury it somewhere deep and dark."

"You didn't forget, Tom," Ruth says quietly. "Otherwise I wouldn't be here."

She saw Christine wince and felt the taxi veer to the right as the woman lost control for a fraction of a second.

"I was there longer than you. There's hope for you," Tom says, his face a mask. "Christine and I are too bound up with that old life. You don't have to be."

"Don't be a fool, Ruth," Christine adds. "Harry Pearce chewed you up and spat you back out. There's no debt to be paid. You don't owe him loyalty. Not anymore."

_Not like Tom._

* * *

She lied her way into his hospital room; her heart beating the entire time in staccato rhythm.

"I'm having his baby," she told an attendant without batting an eyelid.

_It's true_, a voice whispered inside. _Both married to the job. The sum of both of us in secret hand shakes and codes on paper._

She slipped him a note in Morse. Things were unraveling like a badly stitched tapestry.

* * *

The taxi zipped neatly into LA airport. They'd been driving for hours.

"What's going on?" Ruth says, fear gripping her.

"Shaking off any one interested," Tom says.

Mace hangs between them like an ogre out of a fairy story.

"Where are you taking me," she whispers.

"To see an old friend," Christine smiles. "See you soon, Tom. Later, Ruth."

Tom gets out of the taxi and re-enters the airport. Ruth follows. Her world is spinning and she walks as one in an Alice in Wonderland dream.

Within an hour, they are at another terminal.

The announcement blares and cuts through Ruth's scattered thoughts.

"Passengers on the LX5460 to Santiago please make your way to the desk. Calling all passengers for flight number LX5460 to Santiago."

Another destination. She feels like a grain of sand flung roughly from shore to shore. Where will it end?

Tom smiles at her. She smiles shyly back as Santiago echoes in her head.

"It will be all right, Ruth," he says in an unwitting echo of Danny.

Despite everything, (or is it because of everything Tom has been?) she believes him.


	3. Persephone, Rising

The man collecting them from the airport looks terrified as Tom squeezes in the back seat next to Ruth.

She needs no introduction. She should have known from the second Tom had said Santiago, where she and he and now him were headed.

She doesn't know what she feels. Her stomach roils.

* * *

She unlocked the door, hands aching in the Winter chill, smile still on her face after an office tete a tete with Harry courtesy of a dirty bomb.

She was used to the warmth of silence aside from the gentle purr of cats. She didn't expect Zoe in darkness on the sofa.

Ruth knelt down and touched Zoe's shoulder. There were lines on the girl's pale face. Something shifted and rearranged. Ruth had envied Zoe's cool beauty and the strength of her too feeling heart. She had envied the girl her tears over lost loves. Most of all, she had envied the looks Danny cast Zoe's way when he thought no one on The Grid was watching; the concentrated, painful way he sought to capture Sam's gaze as if to declare to the world 'Zoe never meant _that_ to me.'

Zoe woke up with a start.

"I'm so sorry, Ruth. I... I had nowhere else to go."

"What happened?"

Ruth wondered if Danny had already started drowning his sorrows in his tea cups. What had gone wrong between the two? It was more than Tom, an ocean and a widening chasm (chasm of what? Ruth wasn't ever allowed to say.)

"It's Will," Zoe said, tears spangling her cheeks.

* * *

"Hello again, Tom," Will says with a weak smile. "And a pleasure to meet you, Ruth. Zoe told me about you."

Ruth thinks of the way Zoe's face had crumpled every time a new bastard had stomped through the palace of her idealism. And yet, Ruth thought in wonder, Zoe had still _believed_.

* * *

"Harry will get you out of this," Ruth said firmly.

"Not this time," Zoe said wearily. "It's all right, you know," she added at Ruth's expression. "I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth."

She smiled.

"I'll start again, Ruth. I'll be OK."

* * *

Will looks in the rear-view mirror, eyes flitting to Tom and away again in panic. His nervous appraisal irritates Ruth until she remembers Danny and the bomb and the way his house had looked...

But she mustn't think of that.

She asked Danny's parents permission to help clear the flat.

"I was good friends with him and his flat mate," she said, choking back tears. "I worked with him."

His mother placed a veined hand on her back.

"He's gone to a better place, child. We'll never doubt that."

_Won't you?_ Ruth wanted to say. _When Harry offers little answers and a thick curtain comes down every time you ask for something more, won't you doubt then?_

"You take what you want," his father choked. "He mentioned you. He said you always listened. Our boy... our wonderful little boy..."

Ruth couldn't help it. It slipped out.

"He promised me." The dullness of her voice scared even her. "He promised me that he would never leave me."

Danny's parents shook their heads and their eyes met over Ruth's head.

An unspoken love only declared now? Pent up grief escaping in front of the people who could have become in-laws?

Ruth didn't have the heart to set them straight.

* * *

"Do you still take photographs?" Ruth asks at last.

Will manages a smile and a nod. Silence settles like a blanket.

"Tom, I have to know," Will manages uncomfortably at last. "What happened to Danny?"

Ruth sees the way Tom's jaw is tight and notices he is careful not to swallow. She supposes he has been keeping tabs on his old team (the closest thing to friends Tom ever had?)

Will already knows what Tom is about to say as he fixes his gaze on the road.

"Will. Danny's dead."

* * *

She hadn't seen much death in GCHQ- only the kind brought on by the promise of old age or the usual unfair and unexpected shocked that killed anyone, spy or otherwise- but did Danny have to be her first?

Not even Harry's side pressing against hers, the warmth seeping through her bones, helped. She revelled in the hard wood of the pew, in the gloomy intonation of the Hunter church choir, in the upraised faces of Danny's parents. They sat opposite her. Danny had been their only child and yet there was no burning rage in their eyes as they turned to heaven for comfort.

* * *

"Don't tell her," Will begs, looking through the rear-view at Tom and Ruth in turn. "Please."

Tom says nothing, merely nods.

Ruth remembers the way Danny looked at Zoe when he thought no one was watching. She remembers the way the two tipped their heads together to share secrets between friends. How jealous she had been. At first.

She nods, then smiles, weakly.

* * *

She unlocked the door to Danny's flat with a deep breath. What would she find here? Did she dare to find out? There was no one else.

The door creaked open. She stepped inside.

The modern looking apartment didn't scream Danny at all. It was furbished the usual way; leather and granite, even a small alcohol stash (sex and drink the only way to survive this job? God Ruth hoped not).

There was a mug sitting beside the aluminium sink. Ruth ignored the lump in her throat at the dust gathering on the bench top. There was tea in the mug. It was cold.

She tipped the stale tea down the sink and began to clean the benches with a damp cloth. She paused and held on to the sink. Her too active imagination recast herself as Zoe, Danny standing over her shoulder like a puppy, over eager to please.

It was even harder to face the bedrooms. She fingered Danny's clothing guiltily. She had no right to this no matter what his parents thought. Ruth blinked away tears. On the dusty dresser table there was a framed photograph; Danny and his family, Danny with his arms around Sam. She moved to his pillow (under pillows or under beds. Both led to the same answers). Zoe smiled beside Will, arms wrapped around each other, the back of the photograph signed with 'thanks x.' Had he pressed his lips against the photo? For a moment Ruth indulgently wondered what would happen if she took the photo back to The Grid and ran a DNA test. Would they find Danny's remnants against the glossy finish?

As she crossed the corridor into Zoe's room, Ruth winced remembering Andrew and his diamonds. 'We made a promise,' she said to the walls, 'never as twisted. Never as alone.' What did that matter now?

She stepped into Zoe's room. Nothing had changed. A pair of jeans and a cami still lay across the bed. Half used lipstick sat on the dresser. An Austen on the bed head.

Was this what love meant?

Never changing, never moving on?

* * *

Will looks relieved when they hit the suburbs. He pulls up by a plain house. Two children play in the yard. He holds the car door open for Ruth with another nervous smile as she clutches her bag to her tightly. Tom pulls a suitcase out of the boot.

"I took the liberty," he says with his cold smile. "Or rather Christine did."

Once Ruth might have minded. Not any more.

"Thanks," she manages, fighting off a hysterical laugh. "Are you coming in?"

"Just for the night," Tom says, face softening at Ruth's panic.

Before Ruth can say anything more a woman runs out past the children. She has changed. Her hair has grown long and she has died her hair black. She sports a fringe and bright lipstick but her eyes are still that cat-like green. Her face puckers at the sight of Ruth. Her hand goes to her mouth and her expression crumples. Will is prepared, already by her side.

Some things never changed.

* * *

Ruth smelt the smoke from the lighter as she packed files away before another 'surprise' audit. Good thing Sam had gotten wind of that one. Wrinkling her nose, she inched to the meeting room glass, her nose pressed against the dirtiest patch. What was going on?

Tom shouted, his face contorting into ugly shapes, and Zoe?

Zoe sobbed and sobbed as the photograph Tom held curled and melted against the flame.

* * *

They enjoy a leisurely dinner that night. With Tom and Zoe there, even with the kids popping up and down to ask inane questions, it feels like being a team back on The Grid again.

Ruth turns to Tom. She tries not to beg.

"Will you stay?"

"Till morning," Tom repeats implacably. "Then I fly back to LA and Christine. A new job has come up."

Ah. She was a job. A small stitch in Tom's patchwork of a life. Ruth doesn't dare ask what the job is.

Zoe smiles weakly and reaches out for Ruth's hand.

"It grows easier." She turns and smiles at Will, at her two small children. "In time."

* * *

No one knew where Sam had vanished. Ruth made it her personal crusade. She asked everywhere. She waited in all of the places she knew Sam went. Adam pulled her to one side one day.

"Ruth, she doesn't want to be found."

Ruth knew her lip curled at the suggestion.

"She was my friend. She was Danny's friend."

Adam fixed his blue eyes on hers.

"Have you considered that's why she isn't in contact?"

Later Harry called her into his office. The thrill that went down her spine at being in his presence soon vanished at harsh words.

"Sam contacted us. She's gotten a job as a waitress."

"Where?" Ruth asked eagerly.

"She told me, 'someplace where your lot never go.'"

The tears didn't come. Not then.

She wondered later if anyone got notes, but other than Danny, no one had really taken the Scottish paper pusher seriously. Maybe Malcolm and Colin, but if they received letters, they never ever said.

* * *

Zoe and Ruth sit by the dining table. It is quiet. It's been weeks since Tom left for Christine. The kids are at school. Will is at work. Ruth wishes she could bring herself to feel something, anything at all, as Zoe places a hand on Ruth's shoulder.

"You don't think of it every moment, like I said. At least not forever."

A lump forms.

"I don't want... I can't move on... like you."

Her tears drop as freely as Zoe's ever did.

"I can't forget him. I can't forget Harry."

Zoe doesn't look surprised. "We guessed, you know. Danny and I."

Zoe looks away as she says Danny's name. She's never mentioned him to Ruth. Not in all of the time she's been staying here.

"What can I do? What do I do without him?" Ruth hisses at Zoe's pale hands. "If I can't find someone as you have what then?"

The look on Zoe's face cripples Ruth. She remembers now, in the face of Zoe's pity, just how much the girl had always worn her heart on her sleeve. Zoe had always cared too much.

"Get a hobby."

It was unexpected but it wasn't flippant so it deserved an answer.

"Me? A florist or a baker or a teacher even? I can't see it."

There is a smile blossoming across Zoe's face.

"Maybe not. You could write it all down."

"What life on The Grid: An Expose? They'd lynch me."

Zoe actually laughed outright.

"Bit late for worrying about that, isn't it?"

Ruth laughs too, to her surprise.

"Besides John Le Carre has done alright," Zoe mused. "Stella Rimmington. Graham Greene. Ian Fleming."

"You're... you're impossible. You're..." Ruth begins but she can't find the words.

She's already seeing Mace cast as the real villain of the piece; Harry an untouchable Apollo, and her? Lady Lazarus or even a gender bent Icharus- the woman who flew too close to the sun and went into free fall. So, she's been singed but the sun is still in the sky. Can she coordinate a new dream? At her age? She can try.

* * *

End of Part 1


End file.
